So...yesterday afternoon a young man was walking down the street between his house and his grandmother's house. Sounds like a typical teenager thing to do, right? Well, in Ferguson, Missouri it ended up with an 18-year-old boy dead and lying in the street after an encounter with law enforcement.
His name was Michael Brown. And he was going to start his first college classes tomorrow.
Tonight there is the scent of riots brewing in the north county area (where Ferguson is); and there has been some violence that has happened near the area where Mike Brown died. Those incidence of violence don't seem to be related to the protests, although local media want to play it up that way.
Anyway....back to Michael Brown and his death.
Back in February, the APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published an article titled, "The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children". The press release that accompanied the publication of the article says the following:
"The evidence shows that perceptions of the essential nature of children can be affected by race, and for black children, this can mean they lose the protection afforded by assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults," said co-author Matthew Jackson, PhD, also of UCLA. "With the average age overestimation for black boys exceeding four-and-a-half years, in some cases, black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old."
So what does this mean to Michael Brown? In practical terms, it probably means that he was perceived as being older than he actually was and it was presumed that he was not innocent; even though he was unarmed and walking peacefully down the street.
But on the larger scale, the question becomes just how far have we progressed? If black children are perceived as being older than they actually are AND because of that they are seen as less innocent no matter what they do...do black children actually matter? Do they have "inherent worth and dignity"?
In the St. Louis County Police news conference this (Sunday) morning, the chief was trying to start to paint the picture of Michael Brown as some sort of violent person. That seems to happen in every case where non-black people kill innocent black people. Trayvon Martin. Jordan Davis. Reneisha McBride. Just to name a few. And, far too often, the media falls for it. So over the next few days, don't be surprised if that happens.
Dr. Paul Evensen, from the Forum for Youth Investment, said on a local St. Louis program a couple of months ago, "It took us generations to create a climate in which this is not only possible, but acceptable. That this is somehow barely newsworthy." The only reason that the country knows what happened to Eric Garner is because somebody had the gumption to film it (and he and his family are being targeted by the NYPD). The reason we know about Michael Brown is because it happened in the middle of the day and there was no way to stop the local media from getting the story. But most of the time, this does not happen. It is perfectly acceptable for agents of the state to use deadly force with blacks as a first response instead of the last response. And black people are told that we are paranoid when we say that agents of the state treat blacks differently than everybody else. Recent events seem to justify that paranoia.
Two years ago, when I was writing about Trayvon Martin, I used this quote from Melissa Harris-Perry:
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described the experience of being black in America as a constant awareness that others viewed him as a problem. "Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question...How does it feel to be a problem?"... Du Bois captures the defining element of African-American life as the very self, but most especially the visible, black self in public space as being a problem.
The question still remains.....is there a public space in which being black in that public space is not a problem?
